Celina and the Boomerang of Stars Game

A friend of mine just released a new game on the iOS store called, "Celina and the Boomerang of Stars". The game features 50+ levels of boomerang throwing and puzzle solving. Tap the screen to help navigate through the sky and help Celina gather the missing stars!

The art (retro, pixel-style) and music (chiptune) are all original, and the programming was done by one person. Unfortunately, I do not have any promo codes to hand out right now! With that said though, I really want to bring more attention to the game hopefully and get some more reviews, critiques, etc., for him.

Beautiful pixel art everywhere, but then suddenly...rotated pixels. The boomerang and those two square white particles on the left are the culprits. One of the sparkles on the yellow thing also isn't aligned to the same pixel grid as everything else. I think you could make a big improvement by keeping every pixel in the same size, orientation, and grid alignment. If you're not sticking to the pixel grid, to me it kind of defeats the purpose of having your art composed of big pixely squares, and ruins the illusion. Haven't actually tried the game yet, just wanted to give some feedback on the visuals before I forgot!

Thank you very much for the kind words! We definitely like hearing exactly what people think. With that said, let me give some information on your comments about the pixel art.

We are using OpenGL rotation for the sprites because we thought that it would make the animations smoother. Perhaps we should make a rotation animation sprite sheet and use that instead. It wouldn't be as smooth of a rotation, but the sprites would be pixel-perfect.

(Nov 28, 2012 06:33 PM)CatBos Wrote: We are using OpenGL rotation for the sprites because we thought that it would make the animations smoother. Perhaps we should make a rotation animation sprite sheet and use that instead. It wouldn't be as smooth of a rotation, but the sprites would be pixel-perfect.

Yep! I'd recommend giving that a try and seeing how it looks. Another thing you could do would be to use a multipass rendering system where you draw everything to an FBO at 1x, then render that to the screen as scaled-up texture. You could do rotation as you're already doing it, and it would be aligned properly to the pixel grid and end up looking something like mode 7 on the SNES. Drawing a separate rotated sprite sheet would give you more artistic freedom, but rotating in a low-res FBO is probably a bit easier and would come out looking smoother. (That said, with pixel art, maybe smoother isn't always better?)